Friday, December 30, 2011

While some visitors here and even ourselves appear to be absorbed by Roswell and/or other UFO incidents (Socorro for one), and while our friend Chris Aubeck (Wonders in the Sky with Jacques Vallee) scours antiquity’s dcouments, via his Yahoo Magoniax Forum (where people submit ancient UFO accounts), we, all of us, have to realize and accept the “fact” -- and it is a fact –- that UFOs, for all our attention, have not affected humanity’s evolution, humanity’s civilizations, or any significant human enterprise.

Looking through the books below, we found not one item or footnote that referred to UFOs or anything that could be construed as a UFO; on the contrary, lots of things that prior civilizations embraced and noted (with art, writing, and action) were so removed from the UFO phenomenon that one is stunned by the attention Ancient Astronaut theorists get with their seemingly abundant litany of extraterrestrial artifacts and influences. Such artifacts and influences just do not exist, on a scale that betokens (meaningful?) alien visitations in the past.

The books listed here are only a few of the many that we (the RRRGroup and The Einstein Fellowship in Ann Arbor) perused for UFO or UFO-like references:

The Hittites by O. R. Gurney [Originally a Penguin Book, 1952, reissued by The London Folio Society, 2000]

Our Oriental Heritage (Part One of The Story of Civilization) by Will Durant [Simon and Schuster, NY, 1954]

We have culled from those books, the images created by the cultures examined, and present some here, noting the obsession that humanity, the peoples covered by the tomes, had with hunting, war, dress, sex, and death. (None had an obsession with visitors from the sky, except as anthropomorphic renditions of their gods, who also seemed consumed by war, dress and, especially sexuality.)

The Hittites:

Gurney [ibid]

The Mochica (an accent on sexuality and death):

Benson [ibid]

Ancient Europe:

Piggott [ibid]

Our Oriental Heritage:

Durant [ibid]

My point is that human culture (art, writing, warfare et cetera) has been noted by the ancients right up to today, with no ubiquitous insertion of UFOs or things that look like UFOs.

UFOs play no part in the modality of human evolution, mental or physical.

UFOs are a minor, peripheral phenomenal insertion in the movement from primitivism to human intellectual advancement.

That is why historians, archeologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and science, generally, eschew UFOs; the phenomenon is essentially meaningless, like comets or meteors passing through the skies, or the aurora borealis, which is fascinating, but ephemeral in the great scheme of things.

Friday, December 09, 2011

Revisiting Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (about the African Dogon tribe’s alleged contact with extraterrestrials 5000 years ago), some questions came to mind.

Why would extraterrestrial visitors visit a small, primitive tribe in the isolated, at the time (and even now), heart of Africa.

Yes, the Sumerians and other cultures on the rim of the Mediterranean Sea are said by some, including Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii in 1966’s Intelligent Life in the Universe, to have been contacted by extraterrestrials, that left intimations of writing, agriculture, math, and other accoutrements of civilized living.

Oannes, the being from the sea who supposedly proffered these gifts is not unlike the Dogon visitors who told those peoples about their place of origin, a planet in the Sirius star system.

But extraterrestrials would have to be significantly advanced to get here from the Sirius planetary environment, and one would think that such emissaries would seek out cultures and peoples who were much more advanced than the Dogon tribe, to whom they would communicate the locale of their home planet(s).

The chatter between the Dogons and the Sirians would have had to be something beyond difficult.

Even today, the Dogons do not represent an advanced element of Earth’s global society.

Either the Sirius visitors were inept at furthering the cultural evolution of the Dogons or the Sirius visitors represent a civilization that doesn’t regard technolocial advance as a sine qua non of their existence; technology is a prosaic tool, and other considerations make up the essence of their existence.

Or the visit never occurred at all.

For the sake of rumination, I’d like to address the second option above; that is, civilizations do not need technology to be advanced.

Perhaps it’s the music, the art, or social intercourse that is the high point of “advanced” civilizations, not the attributes of the ships that transport them hither and yon.

This would explain, perhaps, why UFOs have appeared in various guises, some not so futuristic as we imagine: the airships of the 1890s for example.

This would also explain, perhaps, why flying saucers have had a propensity to crash; they are not technologically refined, nor meant to be.

They are constructed to get here from there, much as Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci did with their rudimentary, by modern standards, ships.

If visitors sought out this planet, for whatever reason, they would impart elements of culture – music, art, writing, mathematics, and the like – rather than methods with a technological bent.

Technology wasn’t and isn’t their primary incentive or objective.

The artifacts touted by Ancient Alien theorists are esthetic not technological: the pyramids of Egypt and Middle/South America, Stonehenge, the Easter Island moai, et cetera.

What the Dogon were and are mimics the alien races and beings - the alien cultures –that seem to have visited the Earth in the past and today.

UFO researchers, governments, military constructs have missed the point.

UFOs visit to impart refinement, high culture.

And that refinement or culture is so foreign to our understanding, we humans can’t grasp it, although one might find hints of it in such workings as that of the Dogons, or the Egyptians, or the Inca, the Olmecs, the Mayans.

The message of UFOs isn’t about nuts and bolts or plasmatic ships.

It’s about existence as a thing rarefied, transcendental, or, shall we say, spiritual?

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

That strange “objects” appear and have appeared, to humans, in the sky and on the ground for millennia is a given, an observable truth, as it were.

(Ufologists should abandon their defensive posture; that is, ufologists needn’t continue to try and prove UFOs exist. UFOs are a premised reality. The evidence is palpable and has been verified beyond doubt in any number of ways, and by credible witnesses.)

But what of those “insane” perceptions that Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca provides at his blog, The Caravaca Files or Jacques Vallee has documented in several books and lectures?

Sẽnor Caravaca attributes the bizarre UFO events he lists as a product of witness minds, controlled and used by an alien intrusion, yet to be explicitly defined, for purposes also not explicitly defined, but suggested by sẽnor Caravaca to be an expression of a reality that the intruders wish to display, by their staged images and activities.

Sẽnor Caravaca’s hypothesis is interesting, and defended by his observation that the “mental machinations” he documents aren’t ubiquitous, as they would be if they followed the suggestions offered by some; i.e., electromagnetic effects on the mind (Persinger) and psychic projections by elements of a concomitant spiritual reality that exists with humans (Vallee).

However, one has to consider the idea that some UFO accounts that include strange beings doing equally strange activities are hallucinatory or delusional constructs brought about by an initial event that triggers the images and perceptions recounted.

Still, the initial, triggering event – a UFO sighting or landing – is yet to be explained or understood.

But the descriptive accounts, after the initial event, may be attributable to hallucinations, hallucinations caused by a number of psychological triggers as delineated in papers about how the body and mind reacts to traumatic [sic] encounters and affects:

The Interpretation of Intrusions in Psychosis: An Integrative Cognitive Approach to Hallucinations and Delusions by Anthony P. Morrison (2001)

The Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) can account for the descriptive renditions that witnesses have provided over the years for what they experienced.

Such descriptions as those of Betty and Barney Hill, Father Gill in Papua (New Guinea), which represents a “mass hullucination” example, the Hickson/Parker Pascagoula incident, and others that you’re familiar with can all be attributable to the “CBS.”

Click HERE for a table of when and during what activity the Bonnet Syndrome takes place.

Applying what we know about psychopathological pathogens helps winnow many UFO events, but not all, unfortunately.

Some UFO experiences can be traced to psychological operations by various rogue constructs in governments and the military as recounted by me in Nick Redfern’s book, Contactees [Chapter 20] and actual “alien” encounters of a still unexplained kind.

(The word “alien” is used here in its psychological context.)

But looking for more exotic explanations for obvious human mental configurations is stretching human fact into contrived fiction which has, as its downside, a loss of premise stability and subsequent logic – resulting in a wayward search for what UFOs are.

Again, UFOs are real, some strange UFO encounters are actual encounters; it’s the descriptive aftermath that has thrown the topic into a disarray that dissuades science from pursuing UFOs as a topic for scrutiny.

Once the psychological parameters are outlined and clarified, science might be able to tackle the phenomenon itself.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Intellectually scourged “academic” Immanuel Velikovsky developed a theory about how our planetary (solar) system and Earth were formed and subject to catastrophes that were recorded by humans in many histories and works, such as The Bible, (Asian) Indian hymns and stories, Greek myths, Egyptian hieroglyphic remnants, Homer, and many, many more ancient accounts.

His theory may be found in two works, Worlds in Collision [1950] and Earthin Upheaval [1955].

Science has eschewed Velikovsky’s theory, but his insights keep popping up as NASA and cosmologists scrutinize the planets in our system.

While Velikovsky insisted that cosmological events were what humans saw and recorded, one can look pass his interpretations to find what could be UFO sightings.

For instance, this…

In The City of God by Augustine it is written:

“From the book of Marcus Varro, entitled Of the Race of the Roman People, I cite word for word the following instance: ‘There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its color, size, form, course, which never happened before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said this occurred in the reign of Ogyges’” [Worlds in Collision, A Delta Book, 1965, Page 158]

Velikovsky supplemented his theory in later books, Oedipus and Akhnaton [1960], Peoples of the Sea, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Human Amnesia.

Astronomers made it a point to suppress Velikovsky’s views and have been rather successful.

But that’s not what we should be concerned with.

Our interest is in the cited works and accounts that seem to be sightings of UFOs.

The difference is that Velikovsky’s “catastrophic” intrusions don’t interfere with or interact with humans; his events remain observational, not intercessional.

Also, many of Velikovsky’s cited events were eschewed, it seems, by the Vallee/Aubeck book, Wonders in the Sky, probably because Chris Aubeck’s resource venue (Yahoo Magonia X) for many of the sightings in his and Vallee’s book was controlled by the machinations of UFO stalwarts such as Jerry Clark, who held sightings and input hostage to his (Clark’s) view of the UFO phenomenon.

I suggest you get your hands on Velikovsky’s books. Overlook the catastrophic theory if you like – a mistake, as I see it – and cull the events that bespeak UFOs in days of old.

If UFOs were as prominent as they appear to have been, their appearance belies current hypotheses about military misidentifications, mental aberrations, or trickery by entities out to flummox modern humanity.

The brilliance and edification of Dr. Velikovsky will enlighten you, in a number of ways; that is certain.

Monday, November 21, 2011

An attempt to decipher symbols or writings seen on UFOs in the few instances where such markings are reported is stymied by misinterpretation of markings that aren’t intelligent attempts to communicate or are hoaxed concoctions, such as the UMMO logo.

One of our obsessions has been the symbol or insignia reported by Officer Lonnie Zamora during his sighting of an egg-shaped craft in Socorro, New Mexico, April 24th, 1964.

His drawing and observation has been compromised by the allegation that the popularly known symbol is not what he really saw, but a substitution, suggested by an Air Force investigator to hoodwink possible copycat UFO witness.

(We’ve dealt with that foolishness earlier here and elsewhere, along with our views of what and where Zamora’s symbol originated; the real symbol and the contrived symbol.)

Another account of symbols allegedly observed shows up in accounts of Jesse Marcel Sr, and Jr. who reported that the debris they gathered or saw was rife with hieroglyphic-like markings.

What those markings were has been debated often and long in UFO circles, and we dismiss the Marcel reports here to avoid a rehash of the controversy.

The question for us is how could an extraterrestrial civilization or culture develop symbols or markings that are clearly recognizable or understood by Earthlings?

Sensate human writing, symbolism, and abstract mathematical renderings evolved from about 10,000 B.C. and derive from the cultural milieu that is unique to this planet and its inhabitants.

Cave paintings originated even earlier, from 40,000 B.C. but also remain unique to the human environment.

And even then, the diversity of writing and pictorial representation, acting to supplement the variety of linguistic communication, could not replicate what an alien culture would have developed to communicate within their civilization.

Ancient alien devotees will say that if there is any similarity between UFO markings and human elements of communication, the similarity derives from contact between ancient astronauts and human beings early in the history of mankind.

I won’t dismiss the AA Hypothesis out of hand, here, but will set it aside to make other points.

Mathematical symbols and mathematical processes are unique to humankind, and a quirky abstraction that could hardly be identical to concomitant extraterrestrial abstractions.

The odds of an alien culture coming up with mathematical symbols and processes like ours is beyond a statistical probability.

(Read Mathematical Thought, Volume 1, by Morris Kline, Oxford University Press, NY, 1972 to see the gist of my view.)

Either human thinking is unique or the culture subtext of imaging and writing permeates the Universe, and would have had to be generated by a prima causa – God?

Non-believers would be aghast at the suggestion that one supreme thought process infected all living, sentient things in the Universe, but that would be the only agent by which alien civilizations could have similar symbolic manifestations to those that evolved on Earth.

(Of course, one can posit that UFOs come from our future, or past, but that begs the question for some.)

Moreover, if UFOs and their markings come from inter-dimensions, alternative universes, or a realm yet to be discovered or imagined, would the mode of communication for the inhabitants of those esoteric venues be similar enough to ours to resonate?

The UFO markings gathered (or created) by Adamski and a few other UFO “witnesses” are so unesthetic and illogically represented that one can discount their authenticity out of hand.

Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sumerian clay indentations, and even cave paintings have an inherent logic and beauty to them, while markings remembered or drawn by supposed UFO witnesses are sloppy and without cryptological sense, as far as we can tell.

(Maybe extraterrestrial cultures are messy or illogical, but that would presuppose an ability to move between realities despite a lack of methodical coherency of any kind.)

If UFOs represent craft of a non-human kind, would they have insignia on them at all?

The Zamora-seen craft’s insignia is conjectured by Anthony Bragalia as a NMIT student creation as part of the activity that he writes they engaged in to prank Officer Zamora.

We see the Zamora symbol as representation by Hughes Aircraft/Toolco engineers who created the prototypical planetary lander for the military or government.

The IU engineer who remembered a hot-air balloon excursion by a paper company sees the Zamora symbol as the paper company’s logo.

Believers in the extraterrestrial explanation see the Zamora insignia as an alien symbol.

The Rendlesham symbols, remembered by one of the military witnesses seems to portray script and/or images that bespeak an Earthian origination.

A true, alien visitation would hardly display a recognizable albeit inscrutable symbol that resembles a human creation….because an alien culture would not have evolved in a way that communication or identifying marks (symbols) would be so near to what humans would construct or create.

It’s an incongruity to conjecture that UFOs would mimic human endeavors or simulated symbols; that is, unless one posits that UFOs are figments of a kind that tease human beings (the Vallee hypothesis) or that UFOs distort reality to some unfathomable end, as Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca believes.

(Caravaca also questions why Betty Hill’s aliens would have, on their craft wall, a map of their interplanetary routes; such a depiction so unfuturistic and prosaic seemingly, when we humans, today use GPS or Google maps on computers to find our way around our habitable planet.)

Until we get a clear depiction of a UFO symbol or mark, from a credible witness or source, whether by photography or observation, I think we can rule out the idea that extraterrestrials are using insigniae in the same way that we Earthlings do.